this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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Most of the prison industrial complex is actually service and goods suppliers. Then there's the companies using prison labor. And then at the end a few percentage points account for private prisons.
And the system is inherently corrupt. Every time we successfully assert a right they find a way to negate it.
Police need probable cause? Nope. As long as they believe they're acting in good faith the evidence is admissible.
When you get to court you get a lawyer? Well maybe. Is your crime eligible for more than one year in prison? No? Haha no lawyer for you.
Okay but at least there's bail so you can set up your life to not fall apart if you're convicted and spend a few months behind bars? Nope. You can't afford bail. Nevermind that means you can't afford to be flight risk, you get to stay in jail until you confess, or your trial ends.
Okay okay, but surely they can't keep you in jail for longer than the sentence you would get? They can and they have.
The prosecutor changed your charges because you wouldn't take a plea deal, but at least now you get a lawyer! Your public defender is too busy to come visit you. They can only talk over the phone and they warn you the call is recorded and everything you say can be used against you in court. Their only advice is to bargain with the prosecutor. They explain they couldn't even begin to make an effective defense because whatever you tell them will get selectively played in court.
You take the deal, it seems like the only way out of the nightmare. You get home on time served and you find a bill waiting for you. The state is charging you for room, board, court room, and the lawyer. If you don't pay you'll be held in contempt and returned to jail. You lost your job while you were in jail and you have a letter threatening eviction from your land lord.
This has all happened to people. And when Chicago still couldn't get enough, they operated an honest to God black site at Homan Square.
First of all, even if you think 8% of inmates in private prisons is only "a few percentage points", about 3/4ths of all migrant detention in the USA is private prison industry, private prisons cost more per prisoner housing and also result in more violent outbreaks and assaults which lead to additional costs, and they're also the major groups lobbying for control of prison supply chains, prisoner labour, harsher sentencing, etc. They are not a negligible part of the overall problem.
Second, what is your alternative to a prison system? Is it fixing the flaws, public stoning, what? You say that the vague concept of a Justice System is inherently corrupt, I've been asking in every single comment what the alternative is?
Comprehensive reform. Without writing a book that's really all there is to it. Accountability for abuses, strict oversight, public education about how you actually lower recidivism, run goods and services like the military (through a single purchasing authority), and on and on.
The most important thing is to unpack the supreme court. They've approved most of the stuff on that list.
If it can be reformed with legislative actions then it's not inherently corrupt. Maybe it's just a use of language that's causing the disconnect for me here. Shaka when the Walls Fell.
It's still going to be the Justice System after comprehensive reform.
What's your argument exactly? That it's not inherently corrupt because we'd be in a big hard-to-solve problem if it's inherently corrupt, and therefore we must agree that's it's not inherently corrupt?
My point is that if you or they think the Justice System is inherently corrupt then you would be advocating for a world without said system of reform, which would be worse. I wanted to understand how somebody who thinks that would justify the lack of accountability for criminals who harm others, but instead I'm walking away realizing that people don't know the definition of the word "Inherently" and were just repeating what they thought was a figure of speech.
Inherently means inseparable, intrinsic, a permanent quality. If it is inherently corrupt then it cannot ever be fixed by definition.
You are giving infinite leeway to the justice system. A justice system can get so bad that it's better not to have one at all. Even if you place zero value on the human rights of the prisoners, if a justice system can create more crime (for example, by ruining the criminals' families financially, pushing them to break the law in order to get by. Or by ruining the lives of one-time offenders which will make them repeat offenders) than the crime it prevents (by detaining criminals and by deterring would-be criminals), then it's better without it even if it means that crime will have no consequences.
Is the American justice system that bad? Probably not. But if you do place some value on the human rights of the prisoners, and if you take into account the damage done by the prisons and prison accessories industry lobbying? I wouldn't be so sure that its effect is net positive...
"Inherently corrupt" is a property of the system, not of the problem it tries to solve. It does not mean that any conceivable justice system would be corrupt - what it means that any reform that is not deep enough to essentially be equivalent to scrapping it away and rebuilding it anew is bound to fail. The original statement was "the system is inherently corrupt". You changed it to "the vague concept of a Justice System is inherently corrupt". That's a huge difference.
Maggoty's claim, if I understand it correctly, is that the incentives behind the system (profiting from the prisoners) are the problem, and as long as they are not rooted out no reform will help. That's the "inherent" part.
If you think that the justice system can be fixed then you do not believe it is inherently flawed or corrupt. Those are mutually exclusive definitions. I don't think that having absolutely no justice system is better than what we currently have, nor do I think scrapping it entirely will lead to a better future for anybody involved, and I'm afraid that far too many people think exactly that.
Well that's the thing. We've done legislative action and the people running the prisons, police, and courts seem to just find a different way to keep doing the same thing. At what point do we create a new system that blacklists everyone in the current system? At what point do we shut down a system that's doing more harm than good for everything by the most egregious crimes?
Why would a new system be any different, if it's inherently corrupt?
If it was also corrupt? No.
That's a strange definition of inherently corrupt. Maybe a better term would be corrupt by design. If it were redesigned from the ground up, starting with Constitutional reform and then legislation, it could be more like the prison systems of more civilized countries, but a large portion of the public does not want that. While there are reform activists on the left, treating prisoners worse than animals is largely a matter of consensus within the political establishment.
I feel like we've got a good bare minimum framework. Right to trial is a human right in the USA, attorney can be provided by the state if one cannot be afforded, in most of the USA execution is illegal and sentencing limits keep excessive punishments to a minimum. Appeals can overturn literally any decision. Lots of avenues for exoneration. The people in prisons are not all bad people, far from it, but statistically most of them belong there. Especially rapists and murderers, none of those people need to be set free.
A destruction of that system for some imaginary perfect system that everybody will immediately agree to implement sounds like idiocy funded by foreign powers to stoke flames.
We also charge people a ton of money to imprison them, intentionally keep prisoners in inhumane conditions, and imprison a larger portion of our population than any other medium or large country, and allow prisoners and defendants to be exploited for profit, and subject prisoners to literal slavery (as explicitly allowed by the 13th amendment).
So those other countries, their justice systems aren't inherently corrupt?